A child whose mother was overweight or obese before the onset of pregnancy is at a higher risk of developing this condition throughout childhood. This is the conclusion of a study, published in the journal “PLOS Medicine”, in which researchers of the Instituto de Saúde Pública da Universidade do Porto (ISPUP) participated.
The study, led by Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, analyzed about 162,000 mothers belonging to 37 birth cohorts from Europe, North America and Australia. Portugal participated in the study with data from the Geração XXI cohort.
The study examined the impact of the mother’s body fat – both body mass index before the onset of pregnancy and weight gain during pregnancy – in the development of obesity in the child.
The study found that “although the weight acquired during pregnancy has an impact on the child’s weight, this impact is much lower when compared to the maternal body mass index before gestation”, explains Ana Cristina Santos, one of the ISPUP researchers involved in the study.
Researchers have shown that the association between the mother´s adiposity before pregnancy and the development of obesity in the child increases over time with infancy, being stronger after 10 years of age. In adolescence, this impact can be seen in a more evident way.
According to Ana Cristina Santos, the study “underlines the importance of the pre-pregnancy period for one of the main health problems of childhood – childhood obesity – reinforcing that the bet on prevention should happen before women become pregnant”.
The research also calculated the proportion of childhood obesity cases attributable to the fact that the mother was overweight or obese, and it found that between 22 and 42% of childhood overweight/obesity prevalence could be attributed to maternal overweight and obesity together.
“These findings are relevant because a woman who becomes pregnant while being obese increase the risk of obesity in her child. And obesity is a risk factor that is potentially modifiable, so it is important to focus on its prevention”, she concludes.
The international consortium of researchers who gave rise to this article also recently published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that showed that obesity or overweight before pregnancy carries a greater risk for the health of both mother and child during the pregnancy. The complications include diabetes and gestational hypertension, pre-eclampsia (high blood pressure and swelling of the legs), caesarean and premature births.
According to Ana Cristina Santos, “both studies reinforce the importance of the mother’s weight before the beginning of gestation. If in the article of JAMA the impact of the obesity of the mother was seen until the moment of the birth of the child, in the PLOS Medicine article, we have verified its impact throughout children´s infancy”.
The article published in the journal “PLOS Medicine” is entitled Maternal body mass index, gestational weight gain, and the risk of overweight and obesity across childhood: An individual participant data meta-analysis.
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